I'm Latigo Flint, the greatest quickdraw the world has ever known. I can draw, aim and fire a six-gun faster and straighter than anyone, living or dead. If I had been born 150 years earlier, I'd have been a living god in the American West - but I wasn't, and that's the dern, cursed luck that I have to live with.
Blogger.com has agreed to publish a running journal of my life. I reckon that was mighty kind of them, and I'm much obliged.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

A Gun Named Thornbrow Ruinface

In the Squinty-Eyed American West, it wasn't absolutely critical to have a fierce name for your gun--but it certainly didn't hurt.

People think Billy the Kid was fast. And yeah, he was, no doubt about that--but it's something of an ace-in-the-hole if people know your gun is named: Suffer the Hemorrhage.

'Cause I mean, come on, who really wants to face a man who has a pistol named Suffer the Hemorrhage?

Wyatt Earp called his gun: Jimmy Bleeds. It really messed with people's minds. (Especially if they were named Jimmy.) But even if they weren't, they were still too uneasy to draw all that well."Who was Jimmy?" That thought swirled in the back of their mind."Was he faster than me? Crap, he probably was. And look what happened to him."

But when Doc Holliday named his pistol: Thornbrow Ruinface--the bar was set impossibly high. It's cruel. It's savage. It's subtly, ominously biblical. It's the name of a gun you'd wet yourself to avoid.

...

You don't believe Latigo Flint. You think he made up the fact that Doc Holliday had a gun named Thornbrow Ruinface. That's fine, you're entitled to your opinion. It's the 21st century after all--an age of enlightenment, an age of joy. And you don't have to worry about finding yourself standing alone in a dusty street, opposite a man with a gun named Thornbrow Ruinface.

Puzzled over the biblicality for quite a while, then I got it and felt stupid. Some men I have met have names for their "sex pistols". But they are usually stupid ordinary names like "peter", rather than "pussy cleaver" or "Sophie Spasmer" or the frightening "Diedre Deflowerer and then disowner"

Would/could wetting yourself really help you avoid an ominous gun? Moisture-seeking ballistics have been turning up in the diapers at pre-schools in some of LA's rougher neighbourhoods, reports the LA Times. When they say even the toddlers are packin' these days, they ain't talkin' about no filled britches.

Scary times, scary world. (I'm shaking my head as I type, all sorrowful-like)

Yes Toby, Jimmy did die in pain. Well-noted sir. He gagged on bloody earth--gravel and dust and blood reflexively chewed by dying jaws.(Sammy Jack is an honorary squinty-eyed gunslinger by the way. Ghosts got together and decided it.)

If you're stupid Helga Von Porno, I shudder to think what the other 99.9 percentile would be.(By the way... isn't it parents that disown? And so there is something unspeakable about the name "Diedre Deflowerer and Then Disowner". And so then you are unholy. And I am suddenly afraid.)

Tell me now honestly Sam. Would someone with a pistol named Thornbrow Ruinface, ever, even ponder for a moment if he should license it?!

I see Macek. And is your drummer named Sanchez? And does he seldom bathe?

Then I've failed LBB--completely, utterly, spectacularly.

'Cause I'm dead inside Cindy-Lou. I went mad thinking of you--knowing I could do nothing more. (Or I'm an asshole... one or the other.)

You never know until you try Sam. That's why everyone does when the hammer clicks back.